JIE shifts away from incremental approach

May. 14, 2014 - 02:35PM
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Joint Information Enterprise capabilities are being rolled out across the entire Defence Department network, according to JIE Implementation Director David Stickley. (Thomas L Burton)

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The Joint Information Environment originally was planned to be rolled out in increments: the first in Europe, followed by Increment 2 in the Pacific, then inside the contiguous United States. But that’s no longer the most accurate way to describe how the Defense Department is putting JIE in place, according to DoD officials.

“We’re shying away from this whole discussion of increments – the idea that there’s some sequential lay-down of JIE capabilities across increments 1, 2 or 3,” David Stickley, director of the JIE Implementation Office at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said May 14 at the AFCEA JIE symposium in Baltimore. “We’re trying not to talk about it in increments anymore because much of the capability we’re rolling out is truly global.”

The first increment of JIE, the European enterprise operations center (EOC) in Stuttgart, Germany, launched in August 2013, the first major milestone for the DoD-wide initiative. But there’s more to it than just the European EOC standing up, Stickley said, and that underscores the reasoning behind a move away from the so-called incremental approach.

“It’s not just an EOC in Europe. We’re building relationships needed to run an operations center, but the EOC doesn’t stand alone. The network capabilities that support the EOC have been ongoing for a couple years,” Stickley said. “We have seven bases coming online in next 30 to 60 days, we have built out a core data center, our Stuttgart facility has been virtually expanded, and we’ll have capabilities up in running there in the next 60 days. We are putting JIE capabilities on the ground, and all that core infrastructure does no good until you start looking at the applications. A data center with no applications doesn’t help you much.”

Stickley did not elaborate on what could potentially replace increments as milestones to chart JIE progress, but he said the shift away from increments is less a change in strategy than a different way of describing JIE’s rollout.

“The collective decision across the JIE governance board was to talk about what we’re doing with JIE in a global sense,” Stickley said. “A lot of folks were locked into Europe as the first step, [Pacific Command] as the second step and then we’ll get to CONUS. The fact is we’re implementing JIE capabilities across the entire [DoD network] ... all the components of JIE are being done globally. So it’s not a shift, it’s an attempt to adjust what was our previous strategy that looked like we were doing JIE in sequential steps.”